By ROBERT PRICE
Associate Editorial Page Editor

Twenty-minute hikes are no big deal to Lydia Bishop. She goes hiking and biking in the Cascades of west-central Washington every chance she gets. But she undertakes those recreational exertions voluntarily, not because she’s marooned.

Bishop, a self-described “rugged mountaineer,” nonetheless managed to maintain her good humor when she found herself momentarily stranded at the new William M. Thomas Air Terminal at Meadows Field last Tuesday.

She’d come to town to visit her eightysomething mother and stepfather, as she often does. This time she decided to fly into Fresno, rent a car and drive to Bakersfield. She’d turn in the car at the airport’s rental counter, hop on a Golden Empire Transit bus and walk to mom’s house from the GET bus stop.

Bad idea. Bakersfield’s exquisite new terminal has more flights than ever, a lobby that could pass for an art museum and its very own Blimpie’s diner. But no buses — at least according to the woman at the car-rental counter and the receptionist in the administrative office upstairs. Bishop could catch a bus by hoofing it over to the old, semi-deserted terminal a mile away, she was told. Commercial flights use the old terminal only on weekends but, uh, the bus stops there daily anyway.

Bishop, a CSUB grad, retains a high “melt point” from her 15 years in Kern County, so the walk was no big deal. She was wearing a big, wide-brimmed hat, a thick coat of sunscreen and, she noted, “it wasn’t too beastly hot.” She waited alone at the old terminal for 20 minutes — dousing herself in a sprinkler at one point to cool off — and everything worked out.

Bishop contacted GET the next day. Why, she wanted to know, does a city the size of Bakersfield not have bus service to and from its dazzling new air terminal? That’s “a reasonable and logical expectation for your visitors to hold,” she correctly pointed out.
Ah, but the air terminal does have bus service, she was told. Call 24 hours in advance (869-6363) and GET will send over a shuttle that’ll take you to the central bus terminal.

That’s very nice of GET, but it doesn’t do much good if not enough people know about it or plan that far ahead. “They need to tell the people who work at the airport,” Bishop said. “They need to put up signs, too. Lots of signs.”

The bigger issue is the importance of public transportation and the value of intermodal terminals, where travelers can easily move from train to plane to automobile — or bus, as the case may be — without having to drag a suitcase down a mile of road.

It all comes down to money and efficiency, of course. GET is loathe to operate routes that don’t have riders. The agency might have been able to put up with low ridership numbers while it developed that and other routes, had it received the promised infusion of operating funds from the proposed half-cent sales tax last fall. But we all know how that turned out.

Yet other Bakersfield-sized Central Valley cities have made it work. Fresno’s FAX bus line has two routes stopping at Fresno-Yosemite International Airport every half-hour on weekdays and hourly on weekends.  Stockton’s San Joaquin Regional Transit has buses stopping at Stockton’s main airport 11 times every weekday and five times on weekends. Even the Modesto Area Express stops at that area’s airport four times daily despite limited ridership.

The GET folks know all about “limited ridership.” They were taking just three people out to the Thomas terminal on a regular basis before suspending that service after just six months. And people aren’t exactly beating down the door to get the route restored. “Not one single person has asked about it,” GET spokeswoman Gina Hayden said.

Still, GET can do more now. Posting the availability of the on-call shuttle — and making sure airport-area employees know about it — is the first place to start. GET might also explore the possibility of using smaller vans to regularly shuttle travelers from the new terminal to the old terminal until the agency can justify a full-sized bus.

The bigger issue, of course, is the overall lack of interest in public transportation in Bakersfield. In Bishop’s city, buses are popular because they’re convenient and frequent. The opposite is true here, largely because home builders indulge (and probably foster) an appetite for big homes, big lots and maze-like developments, none of which are conducive to public transportation.

All of which suggests Bishop might want to make other plans next time she comes to visit mom. Good thing she enjoys a good, hearty hike.

Contact Robert Price at 395-7399 or rprice@bakersfield.com.